About Eliezer Yudkowsky: Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky is an American writer, blogger, and advocate for friendly artificial intelligence.
Though I have friends aplenty in academia, I don't operate within the academic system myself.
If I could create a world where people lived forever, or at the very least a few billion years, I would do so. I don't think humanity will always be stuck in the awkward stage we now occupy, when we are smart enough to create enormous problems for ou...
I don't care where I live, so long as there's a roof to keep the rain off my books, and high-speed Internet access.
I want to carry in my heart forever the key word of the Olympics - 'passion.'
[...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still ...
A true rationalist ought to be effective in the real world.
People form close friendships by knowing private things about each other, and the reason most people don't make close friends is because they're too embarrassed to share anything really important about themselves.
The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.
When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.
To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.
Existential depression has always annoyed me; it is one of the world's most pointless forms of suffering.
One of chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring rationalists is "Don't try to be clever." And, "Listen to those quiet, nagging doubts." If you don't know, you don't know what you don't know, you don't know how much you don't know, and you don't know...
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.
A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance.
Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to...
You cannot 'rationalize' what is not rational to begin with - as if lying were called 'truthization.' There is no way to obtain more truth for a proposition by bribery, flattery, or the most passionate argument - you can make more people believe the ...
The human species was not born into a market economy. Bees won't sell you honey if you offer them an electronic funds transfer. The human species imagined money into existence, and it exists - for us, not mice or wasps - because we go on believing in...
The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science, the very latest controversies, are worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like 'General Relativity still governing planetary orbits' or 'Phlogiston theory remains false'? By the time...
My successes already accomplished have mostly been taking existing science and getting people to apply it in their everyday lives.
